New York. Philadelphia was not only typical, in many ways it was also exemplary, of Victorian bourgeois culture.5
Figure 1. Map of Philadelphia. Base map courtesy of the Philadelphia City Archives.
To find dramatic evidence of this new middle-class vision of Philadelphia, one only needs to look a few blocks from the bourgeois row homes of West and North Philadelphia to Fairmount Park. For six months in 1876, the city held a massive fair in its park to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. The Centennial Exposition drew more than eight million visitors who paid the expensive fifty-cent admission to see the carefully classified exhibits of science, commerce, technology, art, and agriculture from around the globe. Formally commemorating history, the fair also focused on the entry of the United States into the modern industrial world. Although Americans compared their show with prior international fairs in Paris, London, and Vienna, and found the native version superior in many regards, it was not a perfect vision. The Centennial—like the city and the nation in 1876—was a confusing melange of substance and glitter, commerce and science, public and private, enlightenment and deception. In all, the exhibition set the stage for the next five decades of Philadelphia’s and America’s development.6
The Centennial was an ideal prelude to the remainder of the nineteenth century. This period, usually known today as the Gilded Age (from the title of a Mark Twain satire), was a time of great economic and political adjustment for Americans. Many of these same tensions could be found at the exhibition in Fairmount Park. During this period, the nation came to terms, often violently, with the political effects of industrial capitalism. As wealth and economic power became more concentrated, visions of a classless republic faded for many. At the Centennial, the egalitarian rhetoric of a fair for all Americans was betrayed by the high entrance fee and the decision to close on Sundays, both measures effectively denying easy access to most working-class Philadelphians. The sectional differences that continued to plague the country also affected the exhibition; western states limited the federal government’s financial involvement and many southern states refused to participate at all. Many displays at the fair celebrated the growing middle-class culture of consumption with a panoply of goods and gadgets for the respectable home or office. The grand buildings and avenues of the grounds hinted at the coming planned reconstruction of parts of many major cities into ceremonial public spaces (see figure 2 for a view of one of the exhibition’s grand avenues) while the shoddy, unchecked development of restaurants, hotels, and amusements just outside the gates perhaps more accurately mirrored the consequences of unfettered growth for the urban fabric. But even within the fence, most of the Centennial’s buildings nicely extended Mark Twain’s Gilded Age metaphor because they were inexpensive, temporary construction made to look—from a distance—far more imposing and permanent than they were in fact.7
The Centennial presaged not only the Gilded Age but also the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. A period viewed by political historians as a reaction to the excesses of the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era was a time of middle-class reform. A faith in science and progress allowed many people to believe that rational planning and governmental regulation coupled with private initiatives could channel the dynamic forces of capitalism into less threatening forms and head off class warfare. Not only did the carefully designed grounds and monumental structures of the Centennial hint at the City Beautiful movement but, more importantly, the entire arrangement of exhibits extended the realm of science into everyday life. By the Progressive Era, many middle-class Americans believed that the application of scientific methods could solve most of society’s problems.8
At the heart of the Centennial was its careful, hierarchical classification of exhibits. The system was designed by a geologist (trained in a discipline that employed “scientific classification” or taxonomy), and initially the fair was to be divided into ten departments, with each department further subdivided into ten groups and one hundred classes. This elaborate decimal system would have allowed almost all human achievement to be placed in one of ten thousand classes. What was finally adopted for use at the fair was a modified version of this plan, with seven departments, each with differing numbers of groups and classes. This still impressive arrangement allowed each item exhibited to be assigned a three-digit number that immediately identified class, group, and department. For example, the water color entitled “Interior of the Sistine Chapel” by H. M. Knowles shown by Britain was placed in class 411 (“water color pictures”), which was under group 41 (“painting”) and department IV (“art”).9
Figure 2. The well-organized grounds of the Centennial Exhibition. Courtesy of the Print and Picture Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia.
The Centennial’s system of classification did not work as well in practice as it did in theory, highlighting the difficulty of developing an effective taxonomy. The Chief of the Bureau of Awards (the man in charge of the judging process) afterwards protested: “The classification of articles … omitted some of the most important groups of products in the Exhibition, including tea, coffee, tobacco, spices, and the whole line of cereals, rendering it necessary to assign … the omitted products to groups which were already overburdened.” He also complained that “the obscurity of some of the lines of classification adopted … increased the liability … of articles falling through between contiguous but not always conterminous groups.” Although this application of science to everyday life was far from an unmitigated success, the numeric classification of exhibits at the fair represented an important trend in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century middle-class America: the search for new ways to order the world on a more rational basis. The taxonomy adopted at the Centennial was an early example of the application of science to the problems of society.10
Often historians have viewed the reaction of the American middle class to the sweeping changes wrought by industrialization and urbanization during this period as negative or, at best, ambivalent. Some scholars have found strong strains of anti-modernism throughout Victorian bourgeois culture. Others have concluded that the middle-class home was an insulated, yet ineffective, haven against the turbulent city. Still others have highlighted the escape to the suburbs of some bourgeois men and women. The classic political interpretation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sees this period as a “search for order” by the middle class. Overly simplified, this argument finds that by the 1870s the United States was a distended society in which modern social and economic forces brutally undermined the autonomy of small towns and neighborhoods. In reaction to these changes, the bourgeoisie created a bureaucratic state with the intent to curb (what they perceived as) the growing disorder. Although this interpretation does an admirable job of explaining the broad structural changes in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century America, its focus on politics leaves out many similar cultural transformations. When these shifts in everyday life are added to the mix, they do more than complicate it; they call into question the driving forces behind this middle-class search for order.11
This work examines the changes in everyday middle-class life between 1876 and 1926 to discover the roots of this broader cultural search for order. What this case study of Philadelphia shows is that the women and men of that city’s bourgeoisie consistently reshaped their world and thrived in a society that was transformed along rational lines starting in the late nineteenth century. At first, these changes were largely internal to the bourgeoisie, affecting only institutions that they used and controlled. Later, during the early twentieth century, the middle class began to expand this new cultural sense of order to encompass politics as well. This study suggests that it was primarily a middle-class faith in progress and the future, not a fear of contemporary society, that drove these changes.12
To uncover these cultural transformations, I look at three quintessentially bourgeois commercial enterprises: department stores, newspapers,
